Quadzilla Begins – Installing The OS

Last updated on December 8th, 2016 at 03:31 pm.

My current workspace as you can see in the photo on the left is quite crowded, with both the old and new computers, the laptop, 2 keyboards and 2 mice. Yes, I have a KVM switch, but I prefer to work with separate gear for each computer where possible.

Getting an OS to work has been quite a mission, and I’m still not entirely sure that I have succeeded.

First off I installed Windows XP Professional, the standard 32 bit version. I didn’t expect this to recognise my full 4gb of RAM due to it’s being only 32 bit, and I was right, but I wanted to confirm this anyway.

Next up I installed Vista Business Edition. I was not aware that it was the 32 bit version when I got it, but it turns out it is, so again, this did not recognise the full 4 gb of RAM.

As I have received Windows Server 2003 through uni, I decided to try it out and just see if it would recognise all the RAM. However, it was unsuccessful as well.

Windows XP 64 bit has had driver problems, so I got a 64 bit version of Vista. This seemed to work well. It recognized the full amount of RAM and was running fine for about a day. I got to try out Unreal Tournament 3 which was absolutely amazing. However, today I was planning on moving all of my hard drives over to the new computer since Vista seemed to be working.

I put in the first one and low and behold, Vista shows its true colours. First off it write protected the drive. Upon a reboot it was still write protected. If I move the drive back to the old computer under XP, it is perfectly fine. Back to Vista and it is write protected. I have searched for solutions to this to no avail. The only solutions I have been able to find are to reformat the drive from Vista, which I simply cannot do as there is nowhere else for me to store almost 300gb of data at this time.

I decided to shut it down and switch the drive over to a different SATA port, however, upon doing this and booting it back up, Windows Vista BSODed twice before booting again properly.

When it booted up finally, the drive was all of a sudden able to be written to and data modified. So here I was thinking this is great, it’s fixed. However, as I rebooted it to confirm that it was in fact working properly, it BSODed 3 more times before it would boot into Vista, and again, the drive was write protected.

By this point, as you can imagine, I was getting extremely annoyed. I shut it down and moved it to another different SATA port. Boot it up, a continual loop of BSOD, reboot, BSOD, reboot, BSOD etc. Force power it off and switch it back to the previous SATA port and the same story.

This was becoming very old very fast so I decided to reinstall Vista with the second hard drive already in the computer.

Upon the reinstall being completed, the drive seems to be writable and it seems to have remained that way after installing all of the latest updates and various reboots.

There was a single BSOD after installing the first required Vista update, the new update installer I think it was from memory. However since then it seems to have been fine.

Hopefully it will remain this way or I will seriously start to consider other solutions.

For anyone interested, Quadzilla achieves an Experience Rating of 5.2.